From Cultural Objects to Smart Cultural Objects: a design framework

The paper presents a design framework aimed to transform Cultural Items in Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), meant as sources and recipients of advanced information applied on ‘Widespread Built Cultural Heritage’. The aim has been not just to enhance the artifacts with their own quality, but their unique social, communal, anthropological and urban-infrastructural meaning. The real-time interaction, perception, localization, communication, and identification, such as the ability to manage efficiently heterogeneous data and the levels of global connectivity made possible by cloud computing and IoT allows the transition from Cultural Objects to SCO. The framework aims to provide an extensive and robust theoretical support to design and to manage the processes of Cultural Objects and Cultural bins, implementing a methodological system and an advanced environment based on ICT technologies for recording, storage, processing, access and presentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) data in a Smart Management environment. The framework has been applied in two projects for a prototypical case study of widespread urban CH.